Writing

In the traditional Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with an apostrophe, ?'?, which is the source of the IPA character ???. In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a reversed apostrophe, ??? (called 'okina in Hawaiian and Samoan), which, confusingly, is used to transcribe the Arabic ayin as well and is the source of the IPA character for the voiced pharyngeal fricative ???. In Malay the glottal stop is represented by the letter ?k?, in Võro and Maltese by ?q?.

In the graphic representation of most Philippine languages, the glottal stop has no consistent symbolization. In most cases, however, a word that begins with a vowel-letter (Tagalogaso, "dog") is always pronounced with an unrepresented glottal stop before that vowel (as in Modern German and Hausa). Some orthographies use a hyphen instead of the reverse apostrophe if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word (Tagalog pag-ibig, "love"; or Visayangabi-i, "night"). If it occurs in the end of a Tagalog word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex accent (known as the pakupyâ) if both a stress and a glottal stop occur in the final vowel (basâ, "wet") or a grave accent (known as the paiwà) if the glottal stop occurs at the final vowel, but the stress occurs at the penultimate syllable (batà, "child").[2][3][4]

Some Canadian indigenous languages have adopted the phonetic symbol ? itself as part of their orthographies. In some of them, it occurs as a pair of uppercase and lowercase characters, ? and ?.[5] The numeral 7 is sometimes substituted for ? and is preferred in some languages such as Squamish.

In 2015, two women in the Northwest Territories challenged the territorial government over its refusal to permit them to use the ? character in their daughters' names: Sahai?a, a Chipewyan name, and Sakae?ah, a Slavey name (the two names are actually cognates). The territory argued that territorial and federal identity documents were unable to accommodate the character. The women registered the names with hyphens instead of the ?, while continuing to challenge the policy.[6]

Use of the glottal stop is a distinct characteristic of the Southern Mainland Argyll dialects of Scottish Gaelic. In such a dialect, the standard Gaelic phrase Tha Gàidhlig agam ("I speak Gaelic"), would be rendered Tha Gàidhlig a'am.[]

Occurrence

In English, the (phonemic) glottal stop occurs as an open juncture (for example, between the vowel sounds in uh-oh!,[7]) and allophonically in T-glottalization. In British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er". Additionally, there is the glottal stop as a null onset for English, in other words, it is the non-phonemic glottal stop occurring before isolated or initial vowels (for example, representing uh-oh!, ['o?] and ['o?] are phonemically identical to /'?.o?/).

Often a glottal stop happens at the beginning of vowel phonation after a silence. [1]

Although this segment is not a written[8]phoneme in English, it occurs phonetically in nearly all dialects of English, as an allophone of /t/ in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic /t/ between vowels as in city. In Received Pronunciation, a glottal stop is inserted before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop: sto'p, tha't, kno'ck, wa'tch, also lea'p, soa'k, hel'p, pin'ch.[9]

In many languages that do not allow a sequence of vowels, such as Persian, the glottal stop may be used to break up such a hiatus. There are intricate interactions between falling tone and the glottal stop in the histories of such languages as Danish (see stød), Chinese and Thai.[]

In many languages, the unstressed intervocalic allophone of the glottal stop is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant. It is known to be contrastive in only one language, Gimi, in which it is the voiced equivalent of the stop.[]

The table below demonstrates how widely the sound of glottal stop is found among the world's spoken languages. It is not intended to be a complete list. Any of these languages may have varieties not represented in the table.

Landau, Ernestina; Lon?ari?, Mijo; Horga, Damir; ?kari?, Ivo (1999), "Croatian", Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 66-69, ISBN0-521-65236-7